Blog on the Side

Learn to Smell the Phish - An Effective Way to Train Employees (and Why Not Library Users?) to Avoid Phising Attacks

"Anti-phishing Phil" is a Flash game where you get to help a goldfish named Phil navigate through a sea of URL addresses while listening to lively music. You are awarded points for eating the worms (URLs) that are safe and rejecting phishing style URLs.

Each round of the game is proceeded by a "directions" page that provides the clues and know-how to detect a phish attempt.

Get this game for your library computer training program today. Try the preview version of Anti-Phishing Phil and test your own knowledge now.

Anti-phishing Phil is free for non-profit use and can be customized with your organization's URLs and branding information.

"We found that the cartoon is better than lots of text. We timed how long they spent looking at the notices. It was a few seconds. But with the cartoon, they sat and studied it."

A survey this fall of 2,000 participants found marked improvement in Internet security savvy among novices who were quizzed a week after going through the animated training, she said. ("Web tool detects something phishy", Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)

Anti-Phishing Phil should run on any web browser that has Flash 8 installed. In addition, it runs under Flash 9 in Firefox, and usually Internet Explorer 7. The game was developed at Carnegie Mellon University's Usable Privacy and Security Lab.

Talk about economic benefits of libraries. If we educate people about phishing. Take a look at the cost of cybercrime and phishing:

* $67.2 billion: FBI estimate of what U.S. businesses lose annually because of computer-related crimes.
* $8 billion: Consumer Reports estimate of what U.S. consumers lost the past two years because of viruses, spyware and Internet scams.
* 93.8 million: Privacy Rights Clearinghouse's count of personal records reported lost or stolen since February 2005.
* 26,150: The Anti-Phishing Working Group's count of unique variations of phishing scams reported in August 2006.
(Cybercrime by the Numbers, USA Today)

Thanks to eszter for bookmarking this tool.

Tags: cybercrime | economic benefit | internet security | internet | library | phishing | school